Whatever the Conservatives’ formal position on Ulster’s constitutional future, the Unionist in Neave could never be suppressed for long. So it was not surprising that the New Year (and his last full year in post) found him in trouble for saying that power-sharing in the province was ‘no longer practical politics’. Fortunately, his unconventional ally, Roy Mason, was on hand to dig him out. During oral questions on Northern Ireland on 9 February, Clement Freud, the Liberal MP, raised Neave’s remark, asking disingenuously how useful it had been to the security situation. Mason conceded that the comment had certainly upset some of the minority parties, but Neave insisted that bipartisanship was still alive because the government had no intention of reviving an executive on the lines of the 1974 Sunningdale model. Mason agreed that people in the province got hung up on words. ‘That is why I have purposely never used the words “power-sharing”.’
The Provisional IRA’s horrific petrol bomb attack on the La Mon restaurant in County Down on 17 February, which claimed twelve lives, prompted Neave to further expressions of disgust and a fresh call for increased activity by the SAS. It was his predictable response to every outrage, as was his demand that there should never be an amnesty for convicted terrorists. On this occasion, he also accused the government of miscalculation, drawing return fire from Mason who pointed out that only two months previously Neave had boasted about the army succeeding because it had adopted his military strategy. Neave was not to be diverted from his wrath. Specially trained troops, he urged, should ‘pick off the gangsters’ on their escape routes, at their arms caches and in their safe houses. ‘There may be 100 or 200 really hard men, who are known to our intelligence services. It is these people whom we have to get, and only special services troops can do it.’ This was the first time he had publicly advocated what came to be known as the ‘shoot to kill’ policy, the deliberate gunning down of suspected terrorists on sight. Tom Litterick, the left-wing Labour MP, immediately asked if he meant a ‘shoot on sight’ policy based on ID photographs handed to troops. Neave denied the charge but his intention was unmistakable. He also claimed that American M60 machine guns known to be in IRA hands had come through the subversive network of which he had spoken after collusion with Colin Wallace.
While Mason continued to talk to the Ulster parties about a ‘partnership administration’ in the province, Neave repeated his formula for giving more power to local government because power-sharing was not practical politics. On 13 April, an exasperated Gerry Fitt condemned Neave’s ‘very bellicose statements’ which put him fairly and squarely on the side of intransigent Unionism to the exclusion of any consideration of minority views. Neave counter-accused Fitt of ritual inaccuracy, while admitting proudly: ‘We on the Conservative side stand foursquare for the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.’ Six days after this shameless pitch for the support of Unionist MPs, Callaghan announced that legislation would be introduced to increase the number of MPs to between sixteen and eighteen seats. Not to be upstaged, Neave urged early publication of the Bill.
The Emergency Powers were approved again in June, ten days after Neave took Margaret Thatcher on another visit to Ulster, where she met relations of the victims of the La Mon massacre. In the debate, Neave praised the army’s covert operations but took a much more downbeat view about the future. ‘Most of us were in a hopeful mood six months ago, but it is now certain that this struggle will be prolonged,’ he told MPs, before reiterating his demand for a ban on Sinn Fein as a prelude to crushing the Provisional IRA. In a clear anticipation of the Conservatives forming the next government, he appealed to the minority parties in Ulster to support Thatcher’s (i.e. essentially his and the Unionists’) plan for greater powers for local councils. ‘We cannot announce in Opposition a very detailed scheme,’ he admitted, while promising to uphold the Union. In a rare show of unity, Neave and Mason issued simultaneous statements attacking calls in Britain for troops to be withdrawn. It was a testing time for the security services. Such was the impact of army and police presence in nationalist areas that on 4 November the SDLP’s annual conference voted – with only two dissentients – that British withdrawal was ‘desirable and inevitable’.
The heavy hand of soldiers and the RUC was also undermining one key element of support at Westminster. Gerry Fitt, a supportive mainstay of the minority Labour administration, was rethinking his position. If he withdrew his backing for Callaghan, and Neave could muster a clear majority of the Unionist MPs, then Labour was vulnerable to a parliamentary vote of confidence. The Unionists were natural bedfellows of the Conservatives, and their smouldering resentment over Edward Heath’s abolition of ‘their’ parliament at Stormont had diminished. Recognising the danger, Callaghan pushed through the Bill giving Northern Ireland five extra MPs. The measure got a third reading on 17 January 1979. Neave reminded MPs that the Tories had promised just such a reform in their 1974 General Election manifesto. So both sides claimed parenthood.
As the election loomed, both government and Opposition became concerned about the ‘dirty protest’ in the Maze. Ministers were embarrassed at the bad publicity it was creating abroad for Britain and Neave asked for counter-measures against the IRA’s skilful propaganda. During oral questions on Northern Ireland on 6 March 1979 his call for a locally elected forum in the province went unheeded once more. Both parties were essentially marking time. Callaghan’s decision not to go to the country the previous autumn, followed by the ‘winter of discontent’, made Ulster something of a sideshow. The big question was: how long could the government last before it fell victim to a Tory ambush?
Neave asked his last Private Notice Question on 12 March, requiring a statement on allegations in the television programme Weekend World by Dr Robert Irwin, the official doctor of the RUC, that prisoners had been ill-treated by policemen. Neave thought the programme a calculated attack on justice and the security forces. Four days later, after reading an official report by Judge Bennett on the issue of maltreatment of prisoners, Neave backtracked. He conceded that ‘a few’ officers might have been involved in mistreatment, and invoked the provocation and danger to which the RUC was exposed in their favour. Nonetheless, the ex-POW and lawyer in him did surface. Any ill-treatment of suspects was totally indefensible, he insisted. It damaged the prestige and effectiveness of the police as a whole. That was the last the Commons ever heard from him. But not of him.
With only days to go before the fall of the Callaghan administration, Neave became involved in a fresh twist of the secret state dimension, bizarre even by the standards of previous plotting. A former MI6 electronics expert, Lee Tracey, was contacted by Neave and invited to a meeting at the Cumberland Hotel, in London’s West End. Politically of the hard right, Tracey had never met Neave before but shared his strongly anti-Communist views and regarded him highly. At the meeting, held a week before the IRA struck so dramatically, Neave discussed his fears that Labour might be re-elected, and that premature retirement by James Callaghan could leave the way clear for Tony Benn to become Prime Minister. Tracey was asked to consider whether he would join a team, consisting of various intelligence and security specialists, which would ‘make sure Benn was stopped’. It was a brief conversation but Tracey came away with the impression that violent means were a possibility. A second meeting was planned but Fate intervened. Tracey subsequently told his story to Panorama, which broadcast the allegations in late February 1982. The New Statesman also took up the case. Duncan Campbell was inclined to believe Tracey’s story: ‘He does not appear to be a mere fantasist,’ he wrote. ‘Furthermore, the fact that Mr Neave had conducted meetings of this sort just before his death was known to us in detail at the time, and has since been confirmed by another security agent.’22
In his diary for the period, Tony Benn recorded that on 17 February 1981 Campbell ‘rang to tell me that two years ago he had heard from an intelligence agent that Airey Neave planned to have me assassinated if a Labour government was elected, Jim Callaghan resigned and there
was any risk I might become leader’. Benn refused to comment, arguing that it would sound paranoid if he did. But he confided to his diary: ‘It doesn’t ring true in a way; it sounds like the dirty tricks department trying to frighten me by implying that a serious assassination attempt was being planned. No one will believe for a moment that Airey Neave would have done such a thing.’23 Benn strongly objected to the New Statesman publishing the allegations, but the magazine went ahead anyway, believing that the evidence was sound. The matter was thereafter ignored.
Callaghan’s minority government soldiered on despite the mounting pressures, with Neave intensifying his behind-the-scenes efforts to secure the key support of the Unionists. He appealed to their natural Tory instincts and was sympathetic to their views. But, according to Patrick Cosgrave, he remained ‘flint-like, even going to the lengths of allowing the press to be informed that [Harry] West [Unionist MP] had been sent away empty-handed’.24 Thatcher prepared the ground carefully for another vote of confidence in the government, her third in almost as many years. This time, the omens were better. David Steel, the Liberal leader, signalled his readiness to force an early General Election. The Scottish National Party, irate at the government’s failure to deliver devolution north of the border, ranged its eleven MPs against Callaghan. Frank Maguire, the Independent Republican MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, announced his intention to make a rare appearance at Westminster ‘to abstain in person’. Neave’s discreet diplomacy alas appeared to pay off. On the night of the fatal vote, 28 March, all but two of the Unionist MPs went into the Conservative lobbies. Thatcher triumphed by a single vote – 311 to 310. It was the first time since 1924 that an incumbent Prime Minister had been driven from office and into a General Election by a parliamentary vote of no confidence. The next day, Callaghan had an audience with the Queen and announced a General Election for 3 May. A seat round the Cabinet table beckoned for Neave.
16
Plotting the Kill
Airey Neave prided himself on his clandestine skills. In the words of a former Tory minister, Jim Lester, ‘he was always looking for a plot’, but he regarded his own intrigues as essentially a continuation of his loyal service to Queen and Country during the war. As an honourable soldier he was doing good by stealth, and the secrecy was excused by the virtuous outcome of his deeds. His philosophy was a mirror image of the rationale of militant republicanism. They, too, believed that the ends justified the means, only their ends were diametrically opposed to his: the break-up of the Union with Britain and the expulsion of British troops. That had been their motivating force since the Easter Rising in 1916. The old militarist impulse was revived in late 1968 when the Unionist ascendancy made a brutal (and ultimately fatal) attempt to suppress the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland fighting for jobs, housing and votes, all denied in varying measure since partition. Furthermore, the nationalist, Catholic minority felt besieged by the RUC and the B Specials in their run-down terraced enclaves and many turned to the virtually defunct IRA for protection.
The split between the Official IRA and the Provisionals, which began in October 1969, has been well documented. Their numbers hugely inflated by an influx of young men after the introduction of internment in August 1971, the Provos went on to fight a fierce guerrilla war, informed in fluctuating degrees by emotional patriotism, Catholicism and occasional hazy talk of socialism. The Officials under chief of staff Cathal Goulding engaged in violence, both in Ulster and in Britain. They claimed responsibility for an explosion at the Aldershot headquarters of the Parachute Regiment, which killed seven, including five women canteen workers. But the Officials were also attracted to a political route to the achievement of their objectives: winning support in the minority community and putting candidates up for the parliaments in Dublin, Belfast and London. This uneasy ambiguity of purpose continued until May 1972, when they shot dead William Best, of the Royal Irish Rangers, a local boy home on leave in Londonderry. Driven from the Bogside and Creggan heartlands of the city by local protests over the murder, the Officials declared a ceasefire on 29 May. Military actions, except in self-defence and retaliation, were suspended. They talked instead of ‘a new phase of civil struggle’.
The Provisionals appeared determined to emulate the Officials in the search for a political solution. Their chief objective was to win prisoner of war status for IRA inmates. In late June, they secured ‘special category’ status for their gaoled comrades from the Ulster Secretary William Whitelaw. He thought the concession was ‘fairly innocuous’, but it was to poison the political process for a decade and culminate in the hunger strikes of 1981. The Provisionals responded with a ceasefire from 26 June, and secret talks were arranged in London at the home of Northern Ireland minister Paul Channon. There, on 7 July, Whitelaw and other ministers met an IRA delegation that included Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. The talks swiftly foundered because the IRA called for British withdrawal from the province by 1975, an impossible demand that no Westminster government could have conceded. Whitelaw rejected their ‘absurd ultimatum’ and on 13 July hostilities were renewed by the Provisional IRA. However, ‘special category’ status was not withdrawn. As a genuine ex-POW, Neave was not happy with this categorisation: he did not regard the IRA as genuine soldiers.
The war was on again, but this time it was also an internecine war with the Officials. Some of Goulding’s men in Belfast and Londonderry chafed at the order to halt offensive operations. Sporadic attacks on army and police strongholds continued and a new group opposed to the ceasefire began to coalesce around the Officials’ most charismatic leader, Seamus Costello. Born in Bray in 1939, he had been active in the republican movement in his teens, and in local politics in his native County Wicklow. Costello, known as ‘Volunteer Clancy’ in the cryptic language of the Officials, was one of the movement’s outstanding orators and thinkers. He was also a thorn in the side of the leadership, who finally ousted him at a rigged ‘court martial’ in the spring of 1974.
But Costello was one step ahead of his former comrades, having already formed the nucleus of what was to become the Irish National Liberation Army. A series of robberies and raids on gun shops put them in business, and, following his formal expulsion from the Official Sinn Fein, Costello gathered his eighty followers on 8 December 1974 at the Spa Hotel in County Lucan, near Dublin. His faction drew support from all parts of the country. In the morning, they formed a new party: the Irish Republican Socialist Party. Its prime objective was to revive the link between nationalism and revolutionary socialism. The title was a deliberate reworking of the Irish Socialist Republican Party, formed in 1896 by the Marxist soldier – revolutionary James Connolly, later shot by the British for his part in the Easter Rising. In the afternoon, ‘those interested’ were invited to a second session to explore ‘other avenues’, a euphemism for the armed struggle. Around fifty attended and from their number the INLA was born with Seamus Costello as the chief of staff.
The conference went virtually unnoticed until Costello called a press conference five days later. He identified ‘British imperialist interference in Ireland’ as the most immediate obstacle confronting the Irish people in their struggle for democracy, national liberation and socialism. The IRSP demanded Britain’s immediate renunciation of any claim to sovereignty over any part of Ireland, and a pledge of an early date for total withdrawal of her military and political presence. In the interim, British troops were to return to barracks; all internees and convicted ‘political prisoners’ were to be freed by general amnesty; there was to be abolition of all ‘repressive legislation’ and a Bill of Rights giving complete political freedom and an end to discrimination. Britain must also compensate the Irish people for ‘the exploitation which has already occurred’. The IRSP aimed to ‘end British imperialist rule in Ireland and establish a thirty-two-county democratic socialist republic with the working class in control of the means of production, distribution and exchange’. From the outset, the party adopted an anti-EEC stance. Cost
ello criticised the Provisionals for not being dedicated to a socialist republic. ‘The primary emphasis should be on the mobilisation of the mass of the Irish people in the struggle for national liberation,’ said the organisation’s newspaper, the Starry Plough. ‘We don’t see Parliament as an institution likely to produce the results we want.’ No political manifesto could have been more abhorrent to Airey Neave.
Public Servant, Secret Agent Page 32